Recommended by a Librarian: PRAESA

This is a bit different from previous Recommendations, but PRAESA is an organisation that should be celebrated for the work they are doing!

Today the recommending Librarian is me (Matt)

What am I recommending?

PRAESA

An organisation that has worked to promote reading and literature for children and young people in South Africa since 1992.

Why am I recommending it?

PRAESA first came to my attention via my friend and colleague Ferelith Hordon who met one of the team members of PRAESA at an IBBY event and told me about them as she thought I may be interested as I am from Cape Town. I looked them up online and saw that they have been doing amazing work. South Africa has 11 official languages and PRAESA works in all of them

I heard on Tuesday that they had been awarded the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for their work.

PRAESA has three core goals: to provide children with high-quality literature in the various South African languages; to collaborate with and foster new networks among publishers and organisations that promote reading; and to initiate and carry out activities that can help sustain a living culture of reading and storytelling in socially vulnerable communities. PRAESA works in constant dialogue with the latest research and in collaboration with volunteers at the grass roots level.

To encourage children to read in their native languages, PRAESA produced the Little Hands books, a series of short books in different African languages. Another project, the Vulindlela Reading Club, combined oral storytelling with reading, singing games, and dramatizations, and led to the formation of many more reading clubs in Cape Town and other provinces. The national reading promotion initiative Nal’ibali is a network of reading clubs that uses media campaigns to encourage children to read and inspire parents, grandparents, and teachers to read with them.